On My Son’s Baptism

This last Sunday I had the honor and joy of baptizing my son Josiah. He has been asking a lot of really insightful questions about faith for quite some time. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I overheard he and my wife’s conversation a couple months ago after dinner.

I could tell they were talking about how a person confesses their faith in Christ. My wife had a Bible sitting open as she responded to his questions. I walked into the kitchen and said a quiet prayer for my eleven year old little man. Minutes later he walked in, gave me a hug, and told me about his confession of faith.

I completely resonate with the Apostle John’s sentiment, “Greater joy have I none than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth” (3 John 1:4). Baptism is an ordinance of the church whereby a person identifies with Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. Baptism is a picture of the curse of sin and the promise of redemption.

In Christ we, as believers, died, as the wages of sin is death. However, Jesus’s perfect life means his sacrificial death did something other than merely illustrate sin’s curse. It satisfied God’s judgment on sin. It flipped the curse on its head. By being in Christ in his death, we have died to sin’s power, or, better yet, sin’s power has died to us in an ultimate sense.

All the more, baptism images the reality that in Christ we not only died, but in Christ, we will also live. We will rise. In baptism, we rise to walk in a new life of following Jesus. But that’s not all. In the physical death of a Christian, their loved ones remember this promise of their baptism. The believer has died with Christ, and one day will be raised to forever live in God’s presence.

We celebrate the gospel with every Christian baptism. This is the reality I plunged my son into this last Sunday. One day this truth will be again physically realized in my son’s bodily resurrection. This is our only hope in life and death.